GitHub will be moving their servers to Rackspace this Sunday, September 27th at 5PM Pacific time, and they expect to have less than an hour of downtime. Public and private clone, fetch, and pull operations will work just fine, but push operations, and the github.com website, will be disabled. After the switch, your first SSH operation to the new GitHub IP address will throw a warning, but you shouldn’t have to make any changes to your configuration. GitHub Pages CNAME users will need to change their DNS records to reflect the new IP address, 207.97.227.245.

If you have ever worked on generating CSV files, you may have discovered that Excel can sometimes behave weirdly when opening them. This is because Excel deviates wildly from the CSV standard. George Guimarães has written up an article with all the pitfalls associated with creating CSV files for Excel.

Michael Deering has created a plugin that provides easy to use helpers for incorporating Gravatar into your application. All you need to do is install the plugin, pass an email address to the helper, and it will generate the Gravatar URL for you.

Michael Bleigh of Intridea released a gem this week called TweetStream. It’s a simple Ruby wrapper for Twitter’s new Streaming API. The Streaming API is a new addition to the Twitter API that allows you to create long-standing connections to Twitter. This means that you can receive near real-time “push” updates, rather than having to constantly poll for new tweets.

If you are using Factory Girl and Shoulda, you may notice that your tests can get pretty slow. Pratik has released a piece of code called fast_context. By replacing your context block with
a fast_context block, the setup block will run only once for that context, and not before every single shoulda macro call.

Remember, Ruby5 will be released Tuesday and Friday mornings, due to your feedback for consistent, morning releases. To stay informed about and active with this podcast, we encourage you to do one of the following:

OpenID, Presenters and Cells, git-deploy, and the dog-pile effect are just some of the topics covered in this Friday morning episode. RubyConf also made the list, although it probably shouldn't since they rejected us.